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An anonymous reader writes "Google+ has recently been unblocked in China and Chinese netizens have found their way to President Obama's G+ page. The result is that topic after topic has hit the limit of 500 comments, most of them in Chinese. Some express political views, but many are just everyday banter or showing off."

Interesting how much of the world is interested in our politics.Several years ago, I was walking around Porvoo, Finland, taking pictures. I talked to a few teenagers doing skateboard tricks. In their perfect English, they were very curious how we could have elected Bush II twice. It's all they wanted to talk about.

On the other hand, few Europeans can place and name all 50 American states as well as their capitals, yet they somehow feel Americans should be able to do this for Europe. They don't realise that the pride they take in keeping track of what happens in Germany when they live in Spain is just like an American reading news about the state next over.

It's called a run-off election. In most countries that have multiple parties, unless one candidate already got an absolute majority, there is a second election between the top two candidates, so that someone has to win by an absolute majority.

It could easily be extended to more rounds, where the least popular candidate is eliminated in each voting round until there is an absolute majority for one candidate, but it's usually simpler to just take the top 2 winners and have one more election between them.